Golden State: A Novel (24 page)

I picked him up, kissed him, held him close. He laid his head on my shoulder, his whole body slack with relief.

The house was chilly, and it reeked of pot. The coffee table was littered with beer bottles. Ethan’s Flintstones plate served as an ashtray for the charred ends of two joints.

“What happened?” I asked, my heart sinking. “Where’s Heather?”

“I got here twenty minutes ago,” Marina said. “I was in the neighborhood, and with your adoption hearing coming up soon, it
seemed like a good time to check in. When I rang the doorbell, Ethan opened the door in his underwear. He told me he was making breakfast. It smelled like gas, so I went in the kitchen. The gas was on, but the stove wasn’t lit.”

My heart pounding, I held Ethan tighter. “My sister is supposed to be watching him.”

“You’re lucky I stopped by. The boyfriend made a quick exit, but your sister couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed.”

“The boyfriend?” Tom said.

“Oh, yes, the two of them were very cozy back there,” Marina said, looking in the direction of the bedroom. “I took the liberty of putting some clothes on Ethan. He was shivering. Your sister managed to wake up long enough to tell me you’d be home any minute, and she didn’t seem to know how to get in touch with you, so I decided to wait.”

“Terry had our cell numbers,” I said weakly. “It should all be in the paperwork.”

Marina shuffled halfheartedly through the file folder. “I only see your home phone.”

“This should never have happened.” I felt the rage rising in my chest. And shame. All the things we’d done to prove what responsible, caring parents we were, all the love we had showered on Ethan, all the hopes we had for adoption, for giving him a good and stable life. I could see it all being erased before my eyes. “Please excuse us,” I said.

I walked back to our room, Ethan clinging to me, Tom following at my heels. Heather was sprawled facedown on the bed, wearing a man’s shirt, snoring loudly. She reeked of alcohol. “Heather,” I said. “Wake up.”

No response.

I shook her by the shoulders, repeating her name loudly. Finally, her eyes opened, red and unfocused.

“You’re home …”

“You’re drunk,” I said. “And you had some guy in this house? What were you thinking?”

Ethan started whimpering.

“Dale?” Heather mumbled. “Don’t worry about Dale. He’s a nice guy. I met him out at Ocean Beach. He surfs.” She struggled to sit up.

“Ethan’s been on his own all day! And you bring this stranger here! Anything could have happened.”

“What are you talking about?” Heather pushed her matted hair out of her face. “It’s early still.”

Her eyes focused on Ethan, in my arms. “Sorry, little guy,” she said.

Ethan dug his head farther into my shoulder, twirling my hair with his fingers.

“Get your things and get out,” Tom said coldly.

Heather glanced at him, then at me. “My flight isn’t for three days.”

Tom took out his wallet and dropped some folded bills on the bed. “This will cover a hotel and cab.”

She looked to me, as if she expected me to defend her. “Seriously?” she said. “Lighten up. I gave him a bath and put him to bed, everything right on schedule, like you said. Then Dale came over, and I told him he could only stay for one beer, but then we got to watching this movie—”

Her words trailed off as she stumbled out of the bedroom and down the hall. Ethan had wriggled out of my arms and had wrapped himself around my leg. He wanted me to drag him down the hallway, our old game. I followed her, Ethan laughing now, clinging to my leg.

Heather stopped when she saw Marina sitting on the sofa. “Who’s this?”

“You don’t remember?” Marina pursed her lips, sighed, and stood, glancing pointedly at her watch. She looked annoyed, as if our incompetence had ruined her perfectly good day. I realized that this tableau, which was so strange to us, must be something she experienced on a regular basis. To her, ours was just another unfit home, nothing special.

Heather raised a hand to her forehead. “Oh, shit.” Then she disappeared into the kitchen. With a sinking feeling, I realized she had fooled me. The responsible, reformed, sensible person she’d presented to us during the preceding week—it was all an act. A very convincing act.

Tom was talking quietly with Marina, trying to defuse the situation. “This has never happened before,” he said. “It was our anniversary. Just one night, a few hours—we thought they’d be fine.”

To anyone else, Tom probably would have sounded perfectly calm, but I knew him well enough to detect the note of panic in his voice. He was the one person I could always rely on to take things in stride, the one person I knew who rarely worried. The fact that he was worried now terrified me.

“Have you talked to Terry?” I pleaded. “She’ll vouch for us. We’ve never had any kind of problem before. Ethan is so happy here. You can see how healthy he is.”

“However it may have happened,” Marina said, unmoved, “this is unacceptable. I’ll have to write this up, of course.”

“I’m a doctor,” I said, desperately. “This is a good home. Look at our reports.”

Heather was in the kitchen, banging around in the cupboards. I felt something for her then I’d never felt before, a rage so complete it frightened me.

Five days later, our lawyer called to tell us that Danielle’s sister, Allison, had filed a petition to get custody of Ethan. I was at work when the call came. I put my chief resident in charge, locked myself in my office, and called Tom. He was in the studio and had just finished taping an episode of
Anything Is Possible
. He was high on adrenaline, as he always was after taping the show.

“There’s no way that woman is taking Ethan from us,” Tom said. “I won’t let it happen.”

As if it were that easy, as if he believed the ball was in our court. It was his way to tackle the world with confidence, and he usually won. Life had proved to him that anything was possible. But I understood that this time, we were fighting a battle that might be beyond
our power to win. If reunification with biological parents took top priority in the state judicial system, then long-term placement with extended family members came in as a close second. We couldn’t afford to make any mistakes.

I looked down at the school, the pale orange roof. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The children were inside for their afternoon nap. Ethan would be asleep on his blue mat. He would be clutching George, the loved-to-death monkey he’d received as a birthday gift from the secretary at the radio station when he turned three. I could picture him lying there, his dark curls sticking to his forehead; he always perspired when he slept, no matter the temperature. I remembered the night he came to us, the weight of his head against my shoulder when I pulled him from the car, the smell of peaches on his skin. I couldn’t lose him; it simply wasn’t an option.

I picked up the phone and called Allison Rhodes. She answered on the second ring.

“I’d prefer that you talk to my attorney,” she said.

“Ethan is happy here,” I said, pleading. “He calls us Mommy and Daddy. You met us. You saw what our home is like, how devoted we are to him.”

“Exactly,” Allison said. “That’s why I didn’t do anything sooner. While I may not have agreed with your parenting style, it looked like he at least had a safe home where he would be well cared for. And then this thing happened. You’ve got people doing drugs in your house while my nephew is left to his own devices.”

“It was a terrible mistake,” I bargained. “But it never happened before, and it will never happen again.”

There was noise in the background on her end of the line, a car door slamming, sounds of traffic, heels on pavement. I realized she’d been driving when I called, and now she was walking. I imagined her in her serious pantsuit, taking care of business, while Ethan’s fate lay in her hands. I wanted to scream at her to sit down, to listen, to really think this through.

A door closed, and the traffic sounds subsided.

I was no longer trying to hide my desperation. “This is Ethan’s home. Please, I’m begging you.”

“Kids are resilient,” she replied. “He’s so young right now, in a year he won’t even remember that he used to live somewhere else.”

A sharp sound came from my throat, unbidden. Had she meant for her words to sting so much? “What can I do to convince you?” I pleaded.

“I’ve made up my mind.”

“Please,” I said. This couldn’t be happening. I needed to start over again, go back to the script. I had to make her understand. But the line had already gone dead.

Forgiveness. The churches of our childhood always made it sound so easy. You take whatever anger is in you, and you give it up to God. But on that day, and in the subsequent weeks as we took our place in court and pleaded for another chance, as we called character witnesses and showed photographs of the three of us together—Ethan and me and Tom, a happy family—I realized that forgiveness is not such a simple thing.

Heather had committed no violence, no act of malice. She had not set out to do us any harm. It was a simple matter of who she was, her inability to think things through, to behave as a responsible adult. Still, the net result was the same.

10:55 a.m
.

I lower myself carefully down from the wall, into the park, and cry out when my foot hits the ground. A jolt of pain shoots through my ankle and up my leg, a sharp, angry sensation that travels the nerves of my body, sending off red alerts in my brain. I try to visualize the path of neural messages, as if mapping the pain might somehow lessen it. Every pain has its cause, I remind myself. I grab my crutches and begin moving up Conservatory Drive. Here the crowd is thinner. I long for the radio, that small bit of comfort. What I’d give to hear Tom’s calm voice of reason, talking me through.

I think of Heather in her room at the VA hotel, gritting her teeth and waiting for me. I remind myself that she knows how to breathe, how to relax, how to brace herself for the contractions. She knows how to stand, knees bent, legs wide, holding on to the back of a chair, letting gravity ease the burden. I attended the Lamaze classes with her, played the dutiful birth partner as she leaned back into my arms, rolling her hips on the giant rubber balance ball. She joked her way through every class, refusing to believe that heavy breathing and a positive attitude could make labor go more smoothly. “Just give me the epidural as soon as possible,” she’d say. “And don’t tell me to stay calm.”

I’m moving faster now, feeling a chill in my bones. My bad foot
connects hard with a tough root jutting up through the sidewalk. The pain has an almost auditory sensation, deafening. I take a ragged breath, readjust my crutches, and keep moving.

I remember the day of my father’s funeral, when I sat in the front seat of the car with my mother, her perfumed arm draped around me, holding me close. That night, after the guests had left and we were at home alone, in that house without Daddy, she held me in the rocking chair in front of the television. She kept rocking and talking; she talked so much my ears hurt. I wanted to go to bed.

“Mama,” I said finally, “be quiet.”

She stopped rocking, and her body stiffened. “Sometimes,” she said, “you just have to talk yourself through it.” And then she started rocking again. She talked all night. I can’t remember what she talked about, only that, by the next morning, she’d lost her voice.

At the hearing, Marina testified what she had found that day. She described the smell of pot, the beer bottles, the disarray, Heather out cold in the bed. As it turned out, she had an alarming flair for detail.

We made our own case passionately. The director of Ethan’s school defended us, as did his teacher and several of my colleagues from the VA. A father of two who worked with Tom at the station described my husband as “the most devoted father I’ve ever seen.”

Allison said that she had been willing to let the adoption go through until she heard about the incident with Heather. “I have three children of my own,” she said to the judge, “not to mention a demanding job. I’m not a doctor or a famous radio personality; I don’t have the kind of money they do. It won’t be easy. But I can promise you that I’ll take good care of him. I can’t in good conscience allow my nephew to be raised in that kind of home. With me, he’ll have his cousins, he’ll go to church.”

“We can take him to church,” I blurted.

The judge tapped his fingers on the desk; he seemed to be waiting for something more.

“We can also provide him with an excellent education,” Tom
added. His shoulders slumped, and there were dark circles under his eyes. “We have elementary school tours scheduled for the spring, and we’ve already started his college fund.”

The judge looked over at Allison. Was I imagining it, or did he smile at her? She was a single mother, struggling. We shouldn’t have mentioned the money, I realized. In this tableau, it didn’t matter that we were better equipped to care for Ethan; Allison appeared to be the more sympathetic character.

The attorneys made a few more statements, and finally, the judge shuffled the papers on his desk, glanced first at Allison, then at me and Tom, and said, “Permanent custody is granted to Allison Rhodes, beginning exactly two weeks from today.”

It was like a punch in the stomach. Two weeks. I couldn’t believe it was over. Just like that. I slumped against Tom, and he leaned against me, and we both broke down.

I called Allison a dozen times, begging her to reconsider, but she was unmovable. “I’m his family,” she said the last time we talked.

“
We’re
his family!”

“If you continue to harass me, I will be forced to ask for a restraining order. Do not call here again.” With that, she hung up.

Ethan had just turned four. Allison’s three children ranged in age from seven to thirteen. I worried about Ethan in that house, with those bigger kids. In our house he had his own room filled with toys, his soothing bedtime routines, his shelves of books, our complete attention and affection. How would he fare in a strange place, sharing a bedroom and a mother with three kids he didn’t know? Who would make him waffles in the morning and read to him at night?